Anita Hill was right. Sexual harassers have no place on our highest court. Hill agreed to a polygraph test, and passed. Thomas refused. He called the hearings a “high-tech lynching for uppity blacks.” It was painful to watch Orrin Hatch slime Hill. Women who’d also been sexually harassed found in the hearings no reason to be less fearful of telling their stories. Nor, later, could they take comfort in how Clinton’s accusers were reviled. Or Bill O’Reilly’s. Or Roger Ailes’s. But something changed. The tipping point may have been Donald Trump bragging to Billy Bush about assaulting women. 16 of his victims had the courage to say he’d harassed or groped them. I wouldn’t be surprised if Trump’s escape from accountability for that predation contributed to the decisions by Weinstein’s victims to talk on the record to the NY Times and the New Yorker.

Meryl Ann Butler is an artist, author, educator and OpedNews Managing Editor who has been actively engaged in utilizing the arts as stepping-stones toward joy-filled wellbeing since she was a hippie. She began writing for OpEdNews in Feb, 2004. She became a Senior Editor in August 2012 and Managing Editor in January, (more...)